Migration of seismic data by phase-shift plus interpolation: Geophysics

Under the horizontally layered velocity assumption, migration is defined by a set of independent ordinary differential equations in the wavenumber‐frequency domain. The wave components are extrapolated downward by rotating their phases. This paper shows that one can generalize the concepts of the phase‐shift method to media having lateral velocity variations. The wave extrapolation procedure consists of two steps. In the first step, the wave field is extrapolated by the phase‐shift method using l laterally uniform velocity fields. The intermediate result is l reference wave fields. In the second step, the actual wave field is computed by interpolation from the reference wave fields. The phase shift plus interpolation (PSPI) method is unconditionally stable and lends itself conveniently to migration of three‐dimensional data. The performance of the methods is demonstrated on synthetic examples. The PSPI migration results are then compared with those obtained from a finite‐difference method.